


the blurriness of being alive

by hathfrozen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, Codependency, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, M/M, Obsession, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, Violent Thoughts, gencest with implied wincest, sam dies instead of dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 01:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29958639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hathfrozen/pseuds/hathfrozen
Summary: There are four promises Sam wanted him to keep.(Assumes everything about canon in the finale, except Sam is the one to die instead of Dean. Happy ending guaranteed.)
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 31
Kudos: 151





	the blurriness of being alive

**Author's Note:**

> An anon asked me to do a headcanon about Jensen's comment that Dean would have "wasted away in a pool hall" if Sam had died in the finale, rather than Dean. I wrote a ficlet instead, and decided to post it here, too. 
> 
> **Please heed the tags**. This does have a happy ending, but it is extremely, extremely dark up to that point. 
> 
> Title is, as always, from Siken.

Sam dies slow. It’s an infection, of all the things. He and Dean defeated things so large Dean’s pretty sure the human brain ain’t built to comprehend how fucking big they are, but somehow it’s these tiny little bacteria that tear Sam away from him in the end. 

By the time Sam stumbled into Dean’s room at 1:37 AM (Dean remembers the glow of the digits on his alarm clock, burned into his retina) that Thursday, it’d probably been too late, the doctors had explained to them with grim faces.

“Dean,” Sam had rasped, shaking Dean awake with a hot palm. He’d looked _ancient_ then—face haggard and pale, lines and wrinkles gone glossy with a cold sweat. Ancient, except his eyes, which were all scared baby-brother behind fevered glassiness when Sam had said, “I think I’m sick.”

When Dean had unwrapped the bandages from the wound on his side—left over from a jagged piece of scrap metal pushed clean through his flank on a hunt (it’d missed any organs, they’d checked, Dean had checked, he’d done everything right, _he’d taken care of Sam_ , this wasn’t supposed to happen)—the putrid scent had made Sam retch right there. Dean doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital after that.

He does remember Sam is unconscious by the time they get there.

It takes Sam four days, eight hours, and seventeen minutes to die in the hospital after that.

“Sepsis,” the doctor tells them after Sam is admitted. He's awake, pumped full of medications and has half his blood drained from him for tests, it seems like.

“I'm going to die,” Sam says to Dean after the doctor leaves the room.

Dean scoffs. “Shut the fuck up. Don’t be dramatic.” This is an infection, a pesky little infection, and the hospital buzzes around them with the hum of expensive modern-medicine appliances. The air stings his nose with the scent of sharp kick-ass medicine. Sam is not going to die.

Four days, eight hours, and seventeen minutes gives plenty of time for Sam to talk too much.

“Don’t call anyone we know,” Sam asks.

“Why the fuck would I do that?” Dean huffs. “It’s not like you’re dying or something.”

Sam ignores him. “You tell them after I’m gone, alright?”

Dean ignores him, too. “Why aren’t you eating that applesauce? You want pudding instead? I’ll go find a nurse, get her to get you some of that good chocolate kind. Gotta keep your strength up, Sammy.”

They can’t get Sam’s blood pressure up, and they keep loading him up with fluids and drugs with scary-sounding names. Sam spends most of the second day sleeping. The doctors say he’s unconscious, that low blood volume does that to someone.

“He’s resting,” Dean insists. “That’s how you heal, right? All part of the process.”

Sam wakes up just before dawn the next day, while Dean’s watching Wheel of Fortune on the sleek little television high up in the corner of the room.

“Hey, hey,” Dean says, getting up from his stuffy chair immediately. “That was quite a nap you took.” He crouches down beside Sam’s bed, reaches over the little barrier and grips Sam’s hand. It’s so sweaty it’s slick, and the skin of his wrist above it is burning hot. “How you feeling?”

This time, Sam’s crying when he says, “I’m going to die.”

Dean pushes the button for the nurse, ears starting to ring and body starting to go numb. “No, you ain’t,” Dean says fervently. “You know how many creepy fucks owe us one? How much mojo is out there—”

The nurse bustles in at that moment, takes one look, and says, “I’ll get the doctor.”

“ _N_ _o_ ,” Sam says once they’re alone, his voice all hollow and weak. He’s panting, he can’t catch his breath even though he’s just laying there, limp as a dead thing. “No more, Dean. Didn’t we say we’d had enough? Just—just solid, basic hunts, remember. Nothing crazy anymore.” He gasps at the end of the sentence, wincing and gripping at his own ribs.

“This doesn’t count!” Dean says, outraged. “This is different.”

“It’s _not_ ,” Sam groans. “It’s the whole point. No more getting tangled up in—in this shit, Dean. No more.” He’s still crying but he’s gripping Dean’s hand with what feels like every ounce of strength he has left.

The doctor comes in then and a nurse has to physically pull Dean away so the doctor can get to Sam and look over him properly.

They get Sam’s blood pressure a little higher, but his fever spikes and Sam has a seizure before noon. Dean gets into bed with Sam after they bring Sam back from an EEG and an MRI. They’re far too big to both fit onto the narrow mattress, but Dean makes it work.

“Don’t you dare bring me back,” Sam says, voice all but gone. “Promise me you won’t.”

“Fuck you,” Dean tells him, nose buried into Sam’s temple. “Fuck you,” he repeats, and kisses Sam’s cheek.

They used unrelated aliases to get checked in, so the only funny looks they get are the homophobic kind and not the incest kind, which Dean figures is good enough. All he does is hold Sam tight anyway, so they can fuck off.

“You’re not gonna off yourself,” Sam instructs. “Promise me.” He feels oddly small in Dean’s arms.

Dean asks, “Do you remember when I came and got you from Stanford?”

Sam’s eyes are hazy and distant while Dean tells him about standing outside Sam’s dorm for hours, about needing Sam so much it hurt. He thinks Sam hears him.

“You’re gonna be happy,” Sam says that afternoon, words slow like every single one hurts. “Hunting, if that’s what you want. Or—or whatever it is. But you’re gonna be happy.” He takes a ragged breath. “Promise me.”

Sam’s skin and eyes have started to go a bit yellow. His liver is failing, the doctors say. Dean doesn’t mind. Sam’s still the prettiest thing in the world, and Dean’s not looking away from him for a moment.

“Shh,” he murmurs, soothing like Sam’s eight years old sick with the flu and all he needs is Dean to feel better. “Just lemme look at you.”

“Find someone,” Sam is wheezing some hours later, frantic to speak his piece because they’re seconds away from ventilating him. “Go love someone, Dean. Promise me.”

A nurse is trying to get Dean to get off the bed so they can get to Sam properly. It’s lucky no one seems to notice they’re using wrong names.

“Wait, wait,” Sam gasps. He’s too weak to pull at Dean but Dean knows what the jerk of Sam’s chin means. Sam’s breath smells sour when he kisses Dean, chaste and shaky. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Sam tells him, words rough on Dean’s lips.

The nurse is forceful in getting Dean off the bed then, and Dean watches them push something into the IV that makes Sam’s eyelids go heavy—but doesn’t put him to sleep—before they shove a tube down his baby brother’s throat.

Sam’s in and out after that, but when he’s awake, he keeps his eyes on Dean while Dean holds him on that crowded, stiff bed.

“I love you so much,” Dean tells him, stroking Sam’s sweaty, dirty hair. He looks about as old as Dean feels. He tells Sam how he’s always looked up to him, how proud he is of Sam.

Sam’s out again when the doctor comes in late that night with more tests. “It’s only a matter of time,” the doctor explains, dispassionate and distant. “You can keep him on the ventilator or take him off, but either way, I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do but wait.”

When Dean looks to Sam, says he’ll wait until Sam wakes again so Sam can decide what to do, the doctor gives him a pitying look. “I don’t think he’s going to wake again, sir. You’re listed on his advance directive to make these kind of choices on his behalf.”

Dean’s spent his whole life wanting to be the one in charge of Sam, frustrated when Sam won’t just let Dean do what’s best and take care of him, annoyed at Sam’s stubbornness. He wishes now with everything he is that he didn’t have to be the one to take care of this.

They pull the tube out because if Sam wakes again, Dean wants him to be able to talk.

Sam doesn’t wake again, and the room is startlingly silent when he dies in Dean’s arms a few hours later. 

That’s four promises Sam wanted him to keep, Dean’s mind repeats blankly when he drives back to the bunker all alone later. There’s nothing in his stomach because he hasn’t eaten in three days, but as soon as he gets inside, he runs to the bathroom to vomit bile until his whole body aches from it.

Miracle finds him sitting on the cold floor. Guilt tugs at Dean even though he can’t feel anything else and he gets up, goes out to the kitchen to see several food bowls out, one with a good amount of dog food still in it. There’s an absolutely rancid doggy pad in the far corner, but Miracle seems no worse for wear.

Dean doesn’t remember setting all this up. It must have been Sam, who would never forget something like that, even at the brink of death.

“Sorry, buddy,” Dean says hollowly to Miracle.

He cleans up the mess, gives Miracle a fistful of lunch meat from the fridge as some sort of apology, then trudges to Sam’s room. He can’t bring himself to get on the bed, so he lays flat out on the floor instead and wills any batshit being that might be listening in to stay the fuck away. He dares someone to try to come find him right now so he can kill them. It doesn’t matter who.

No one comes.

There are four promises Sam wanted him to keep.

At some point, Dean gets up to feed himself. The food tastes like ash in his mouth, so he focuses on the sensation of swallowing instead. He washes it down with whisky, until he feels warm enough that it doesn’t hurt so bad to think a little bit.

He wonders where Sam is, what it’s like, since everything changed upstairs. He figures someone somewhere could get him that information, but if it wasn’t good, he couldn’t bear it, so he doesn’t try finding out.

“They don’t get to grieve for him,” Dean tells Miracle when he decides he isn’t calling anybody to tell them. “They ain’t allowed. They don’t get it.” Dean’s had the worst things in the known universe leeching off of him, trying to turn him into evil, but this is the most rotten, meanest he’s ever felt. He doesn’t fucking care.

Dean keeps sleeping on the floor of Sam’s room, so that his neck forms a permanent ache from the unforgiving surface and the awkward angle. He doesn’t care about that either.

On Sam’s birthday, Dean sits in the middle of the library and puts his pistol in his mouth. He flips a coin, which tells him to pull the trigger, but Miracle pads into the room right then, like something out of a goddamn movie. Dean takes the pistol out of his mouth, glares at Miracle, then sighs and gets down to hug the dog, who loves him still.

“Wanna go for a walk?” 

Dean walks Miracle every day. It’s the happiest he gets, and feeling happy makes him want to die, because there shouldn’t be any kind of happy without Sam. He keeps doing it because taking care of Miracle is all he’s any good at anymore and because it’s as close to keeping that promise for Sam as he can get.

There’s a woman with dimples and a warm smile at the nearest liquor store. She keeps trying to chat Dean up since Dean is there three times a week picking up his meals—vodka for breakfast, whisky for lunch and dinner. Dean doesn’t give her a thing. Who flirts with the fucking alcoholic anyway?

He realizes he’s literally wasting away at one point, maybe a year, maybe two after Sam’s gone. He looks in the mirror one morning and sees a gaunt, frail man. Dean’s tempted to keep going as he is, but that would be just about offing himself, and Sam had four promises he wanted Dean to keep.

So, he has chicken and rice with his liquor every day, and starts training again until he doesn’t feel like he’s going to keel over every time he stands up. Miracle lays out across his legs while Dean sits on the floor of Sam’s room and searches up possible hunts on his laptop. He’s starting to hear things at this point, and Miracle’s gotten used to ignoring him when Dean answers the phantom of Sam’s voice saying things like, “Could be a werewolf,” and “Deaths only come at the solstice, what could that mean?”

Dean keeps the hunts as close to the bunker as possible, so he’s never away from Miracle more than a day or two. He feels fucking high every time he gets to kill something and cries every time he comes home to Miracle. He clutches him tight, pets him, and throws a ball just to see what joy looks like.

“You’re a good dog, you know that?” Dean tells Miracle often, wondering how this dog seems so happy—panting wide mouth and wagging tail—watching Dean sink into madness more and more as years go by.

When Miracle dies, it’s been almost ten years without Sam, and Dean drives blackout drunk along the highway, hoping for death and not caring if he kills somebody else along the way. He makes it back home, somehow without hurting anyone, and when he wakes up the next morning, hungover as all hell, he thinks _I_ _’m finally the monster they always wanted me to be_.

He can’t stand to be in the bunker anymore, not without Miracle, not without Sam. Not without anything that makes Dean a good man. 

There are four promises Sam wanted him to keep. 

At first, Dean follows hunts through the backroads of America, like a good little soldier following his dead baby brother’s orders. Every time he makes it through a hunt without intentionally getting himself killed, he rewards himself with a night in the nearest bar, drinking in a corner near the pool table until closing or until they kick him out.

Eventually, he stops following the hunts and just follows the bars instead. If he’s lucky, someone will pick a fight with him because the middle-aged scarred drunkard in the back of the bar is an easy target. Sometimes he wins, but on good nights, he gets the shit kicked out of him and then he gets to go sleep it off the motel for the next few nights, denying himself any pain meds.

No one comes for Dean. No pesky, self righteous supernatural fucker, no sad-eyed old friend or eagle-eyed fellow hunter who might know of Dean Winchester.

Dean’s 53 or 54 or 55—or something like that, he doesn't know or care—when he’s in Palo goddamn Alto, California. He's sitting in a bar Sam might’ve gone to when he was 20 and safe from Dean and all the ways Dean wanted him. He feels his heart flutter in his chest, head swimming. He only realizes it ain’t the fucking grief when he coughs a few days later in the motel and something pink comes up.

Dean goes to the hospital, because he wants to make sure he’s finally dying.

“Your heart is failing,” the doctor tells him, looking stern. “Your BAC even right now is well over the legal limit and there’s scarring on your liver. Chronic alcoholism can damage the organs. We can put you on medications for your heart and you need to seek substance abuse intervention right away—”

“How long do I got?” Dean asks brusquely. “With nothing for my heart, how long do I got?”

The doctor stares at him. “Sir….”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Dean snarls. “I got a fucking right to know what’s happening to my body and I’m asking you a question, you better goddamn answer it.”

“Weeks,” the doctor says stiffly, and sweeps out of the room. Dean hears her mutter to the nurse something about a psych consult.

Dean’s dying, which makes him more motivated than he’s been since Sam died, and he waits until the hall sounds empty enough to discard his IV and sneak out of the building. He’s efficient and quick, like it’s twenty-five years ago, and he and Sam are making an adrenaline-fueled getaway.

There are four promises Sam wanted him to keep. Dean’s kept two, more or less, and he figures that has to be good enough.

He makes his way back to the bunker, because he doesn’t want to be found in a motel by some poor unsuspecting soul. The place feels even emptier than when he and Sam came across it all those years ago.

Dean feeds himself, to keep up the idea that he’s not just killing himself, and waits. He thinks about going to Sam’s bed whenever he feels like sleeping, but he doesn’t want to end up dying there. He doesn’t deserve that comfort. He spends most of his time on the couch, finally letting himself think freely about Sam.

He wonders what it would be like if it had turned out the way it was supposed to, if they’d been given the lives they fucking earned after all the bullshit they were put through. If they’d been allowed to spend the next decades of their lives making choices all on their own.

He’s thinking about a graying Sam teaching at a community college and himself running an auto garage. He’s thinking about Sam squinting at the laptop while they look for an easy hunt every few months, just to keep spry, and bullying Sam about needing glasses until Sam gives in and gets some. He’s thinking about learning how to cook properly and getting Sam to relax and eat well for once. He’s thinking about more wrinkles on Sam’s face every year, lines to kiss when Sam’s bitching at him about the laundry.

He’s thinking about Sam when he dies on the couch, all alone and ready to finally fucking go.

Heaven’s got the crispest air Dean’s ever breathed, and he’s dead but his heart ain’t failing in his chest, his whole body doesn’t hurt a bit, and he’s sober for the first time in years. He feels young and strong again.

Sam is fresh-faced and sweet as he was the day Dean dragged him away from Stanford. He’s perched on the hood of the Impala, bangs in his eyes and a smile on his face. Dean knows sure as anything this is _Sam_ , really truly Sam, and not just the memory of him. Miracle is snoozing nearby on the warm pavement of the bridge, ear flicking as a breeze rolls past. The years are melting slow and murky in Dean’s mind, sinking away somewhere he doesn’t care because all that matters now is this: the eternity he’s been waiting for.

"Sammy,” Dean says, hears how strong and sure his voice sounds, nothing like he’d gotten used to hearing himself. The smell of Sam is a drug to Dean when it fills his nose as soon as he sweeps Sam up into a hug, burying his face in Sam’s neck.

“Dean, Dean,” Sam is saying, laughing and sounding healthy, sounding perfect, nothing like the man who died in Dean’s arms because Dean didn’t take care of him right.

It’s a good weakness that overtakes Dean right then, making his knees buckle until he drops to the ground before Sam, leaning forward to rest his head on Sam’s thigh, gripping his calves tight.

“How long’s it been? I can’t tell,” Sam murmurs softly, hand petting over Dean’s head. “But I missed you.”

Dean shuts his eyes. “Doesn’t matter.”

Sam nudges at Dean with his leg until Dean scoots back slightly and Sam comes down too, squished between Dean and the bumper of the Impala. He’s all but on Dean’s lap, their folded legs pressed tight together, and their foreheads bumping, noses brushing.

“Were you happy? Like I asked? Did you find someone?” Sam’s hands are big and warm on either side of Dean’s face.

“Sure, Sammy,” Dean says, light with euphoria and free from grief. "It was great.”

Sam laughs, breath ghosting over Dean’s face. He kisses the corner of Dean’s mouth. Blurred by their proximity, Dean can just make out the shine of tears in Sam’s eyes. “Shouldn’t lie to me here,” Sam tells him. “We’re in Heaven, you know.”

“I know,” Dean agrees wholeheartedly. “Now shut up and let me hold you.”

Sam doesn’t shut up, keeps rambling. He does let Dean hold him, which means that, yes, this is Heaven. Dean breathes it in.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're inclined, I _feast_ upon kudos and comments, it means so much to me. I reply to all comments!
> 
> The tumblr post for this fic is [here](https://hathfrozen.tumblr.com/post/645269337401425920/the-blurriness-of-being-alive-author-hathfrozen) if you'd like to reblog.
> 
> There's also the original ask this was answering [here.](https://hathfrozen.tumblr.com/post/645262851913744384/i-was-gonna-ask-for-an-analysis-on-this-but-i-see)
> 
> Sigh. 
> 
> Sam/Dean really break every rule for me. When I first started writing fic many years ago, I swore I would never, ever write major character death and yet here we are.
> 
> I'd say I hoped you enjoyed it but is that possible...?
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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